


Paper Hearts

by YamiHeart



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 14:43:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4610637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YamiHeart/pseuds/YamiHeart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Francois Bonnefoy was the kind of man who was irresistible in his personal life and intolerable at work. Luckily for him, he’s about to find a man who’s whole profession consists of dealing with tantrums.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paper Hearts

“I cannot write anymore! I quit!”

Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed as the papers thrown into the air fluttered gracefully to the ground. “Francois, stop being so dramatic. You  _can_  write. What you are experiencing right now is writer’s block, and it shall pass. Now get over yourself and pick up this mess.”

“No,” Francois pouted while overdramatically draping himself over the arm of his plush leather couch.  “No to everything you have said to me! This is truly the end of my career as a writer. My millions of fans will allow me to fade into obscurity because I have disappointed them so thoroughly! Oh, just let me die on this couch so I do not have to face the critics’ ridicule of my entire career!”

Unable to take the mess, Arthur began to pick up the fragments of numerous stories his pain-in-the-ass author had started and discarded in the month since their last meeting. Francois may have been a multiple-award-winning author, but he was so damned difficult to work with that no one besides Arthur at the publishing agency was willing to put up with him, and even then Arthur only stayed because of the fat paychecks Francois’ book sales brought in.

“This is not the first time you have missed a deadline set by me, Francois. Why on earth are you acting like this one is the end of the world?”

The Frenchman threw an arm over his eyes. “Why? Because I can feel that all my inspiration has gone. Anything I start is clichéd and lifeless! You will find that one of those papers is a feeble attempt at a vampire romance!”

“What is wrong with that? Vampire romance has been hot for a while now.”

Francois lifted his arm to shoot daggers at his editor. “Did you seriously just ask me what is wrong with vampire romance?  _What is wrong with vampire romance?_ ” He snorted and turned to curl up on his side. “I have changed my mind. Let me die here so that I do not have to live in a society where vampire romance has become an acceptable genre of fiction.”

Rolling his eyes, Arthur placed the gathered stack of papers on the coffee table and sat back down in Francois’ black leather loveseat. “So this is how a successful decade comes to an end? With the illustrious author Francois Bonnefoy giving up and dying on the couch in his living room?”

Any chance of Arthur actually listening to the answer Francois gave vanished when his phone vibrated, signaling that he had gotten a text. However, Francois, so wrapped up in his own despair, did not notice the buzzing and continued his moaning.

“I did not ask for this ending,  _mon ami_. Had I been the author of my own fate, I would have gone out more appropriately only after eighty years of living life to its fullest.” The thirty-two-year-old’s tone then took on a more passionate note as he was seized by the vision of the perfect version of the end of his life. “My partner would be by my bedside, holding my hand tenderly between his or her own, both of us fighting back tears as we say our final goodbyes. Our children would be on the other side of my bed, begging me to hold on just a little longer.” He sat up with his eyes closed so that the scene wouldn’t leave his mind. “As the final breaths exit my lips, the whole room becomes a chorus of cries and laments, and in true romantic style my final words are a declaration of love to my partner. Then,” he paused dramatically, “my world would go black.”

“Uh huh. Are you hungry?”

The spell Francois had put on himself broke in an instant. “…What?” He turned his head toward Arthur and choked back a gasp. “Y-You! What are you doing on that phone of yours? Surely it cannot be more important than our discussion!”

“You would be wrong. This is very important.” Arthur briefly glanced up from his phone before bringing his green eyes back to the screen and taping on the surface with his pointer finger. “I’m texting my husband and he said he does not mind if you join us for dinner.” Arthur wasn’t happy with it and he knew his husband wasn’t either, but when Francois was in one of his moods he had to be forced out of the house as soon as possible to keep him from becoming an un-showered mess. Francois’ beard was already two days too long. Another week and the usually well-groomed Frenchman would look like he was a survivor of the apocalypse.

“Yes, let me go to dinner with the two happiest people on earth while I am in a writing rut that prevents me from creating even a paragraph of good romantic literature.” Francois grabbed a blanket from the back of his couch and huddled under it. “No thank you. I give up. Leave me alone to die so that I can cease being a stain on this planet’s history.”

“Lord give me strength…” Arthur mumbled under his breath. He stood and stopped in front of the couch with his arms crossed over his chest. “Get up. You are going whether you like it or not.”

“No.”

“Get up, Francois.”

“No.”

“Get. Up.”

“Make me.”

Francois probably shouldn’t have said that, because in the next second he was on the floor and getting dragged toward the door by his legs.

“You British brute! Release me this instant!” Francois desperately latched on to a passing corner of the wall, making Arthur truly question if his paychecks every week were worth this insane amount of drama.

They probably weren’t, but he didn’t have the heart to force anyone else to deal with  _this_  every missed deadline.

After another ten minutes of struggling and destroying of Francois’ luxurious apartment, Arthur was finally able drive home with the damned brat sulking in the passenger’s seat. Arthur’s mood was only saved by the warm welcome of his husband at the door of their comfortable two-story home. As Arthur’s husband, otherwise known as Alfred, hugged the Brit tight and slathered his face in kisses, Francois shuffled past them, a forming storm cloud nearly visible over his head.

“Hey babe,” Alfred greeted happily during a break in his kissing. “I would ask how work was, but since ya brought it home, I think I can guess the answer.” Alfred laughed while Arthur just rolled his eyes.

“Yes, well, let us hope getting out of his apartment will get him out of his awful mood, otherwise I will strangle him.”

“Don’t worry, honey bun,” Alfred pecked his husband on the lips, the only place in his previous onslaught that he had purposefully missed. “I’ll either hold ya back, help ya hide the body, or pay your bail.”

Arthur shook his head, a quiet chuckle escaping his lips. “Thanks luv. I appreciate it.”

Meanwhile, Francois was slumped over the dining room table thinking of all the ways it was possible for him to fade from existence.

“Perhaps the floor could open up and swallow me whole… or maybe I shall sit here long enough to turn into dust and blow in the wind… there is always the possibility that I will simply blink out of reality, but it seems unlikely…”

“Um… excuse me?” Francois’ face scrunched as a foreign voice suddenly wafted to his ears. “Who… Who are you talking to? Are you alright?”

Francois slowly turned his head so that his left cheek was on the table and his eyes were able to look up at the mysterious man who had entered the dining room. The man towered over Francois, easily reaching more than six feet in height, and he was dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt. His hair was an autumn blond falling just beneath his chin, but his eyes… oh, his gorgeous wintery eyes were hidden behind metal rimmed glasses that were just a touch higher on the right than the left.

“Who are you?” Francois asked, his cheek still pressed to the wooden surface.

“I’m pretty sure I’m the one who should be asking that question… but…” The man’s chapped lips quirked into an awkward smile, reflecting the awkward situation. “My name is Mathieu. Now,” Just as quickly as it had come, the smile vanished. “Who are you, who are you talking to, and are you alright?”

Francois ignored the first two questions and just groaned, his eyes falling to a pen lying on the corner of the table. “No, I am not alright. I am not alright at all. I am a failure as a human being.”

“Oh, come now.” Mathieu pulled up the nearest chair and sat in it. Despite the irritation he must have been feeling after having his questions ignored twice, a warm smile came to his face. “That can’t be true.”

“It is,” Francois insisted. “I am supposed to be one of the best romance novelists in the world, but I have no inspiration for a quality story.”

“None at all?”

“None.”

“Hm…” Mathieu picked up the pen Francois had focused on along with a pad of paper and began to write.

Francois wanted to act disinterested, but his curiosity got the best of him. “What are you doing?”

“I’m writing.”

“I can see that. What are you writing?”

“A story.”

Francois lifted his head from the table. “About what?”

Mathieu shrugged. “I don’t know.”

The Frenchman became momentarily disoriented “How can you not know? If you do not know what you are writing, then you cannot be sure it will be any good!”

Again, Mathieu shrugged. “We’ll just have to see how it turns out, eh?”

To this, Francois didn’t know what to say.

His eyes were fixated on Mathieu as the pen moved this way and that, though the words that were being scrawled couldn’t be seen because Mathieu was holding the pad up as he wrote. After a silent minute Mathieu glanced up, locked his eyes with Francois’, and smiled.

“Would you like to try?”

Francois held up his hands and shook them in time with his head. “Oh, no, no, I… I cannot remember the last time I just  _wrote_. I do not think I remember how.”

“But it’s easy! Here,” Mathieu got up to grab another pen and another notepad from the nearby china cabinet and presented them to Francois. “I’ll even give you a prompt to help you along.”

On top of Francois’ notepad Mathieu wrote the words, “flower”, “ball”, and “post office”. Francois hesitantly grabbed the pad and pen, silently wondering why he was even listening to this mysterious Mathieu.

“So… you want me to write a story with a flower, a ball, and a post office in it?”

Mathieu nodded. “Bingo.”

“B…But…” Francois’ arms fell to his sides in defeat. “What if what I write is no good?”

Mathieu picked Francois’ arms back up and rested them on the table. “Who cares? Just write.”

Francois could see he wasn’t going to win against Mathieu. “…Fine, but do not expect much. A-And do not laugh when I finish!”

“I won’t.”

Francois stared at the blank space beneath Mathieu’s handwriting, trying to think of something ,  _anything_ , to write. He slowly brought ballpoint tip to the paper, pulled it back, then returned it. Once the first stroke was made, more followed with less hesitation until one page front-and-back had been completely filled. The story was short, but it was the first complete story he had written in months, and the Frenchman felt… liberated. So he  _could_  still write. Now the question was did he write anything of value?

“Are you done?”

Francois looked up to see Mathieu patiently waiting in his seat, an ink-marked page of his own in his hand. Francois glanced back at his work one last time before nodding. To this, Mathieu’s warm smile grew bigger.

“Great. How about you read it out loud to me?” Francois tensed up, but Mathieu was instantly there to ease his worries. “It’ll be fine. I promised not to laugh, didn’t I? If it’s really so terrible, then we’ll burn it so no one else in the whole world had to read it, okay?”

Francois nodded, took a deep breath, and held up his story so that he could read it to Mathieu while facing him instead of the table.

“ ‘The first time they met was when they were both five. Anna’s pigtails bobbed up and down behind her head as she ran through the park on the summer afternoon. She had been playing soccer by herself with a ball she had stolen from the mean boy next door, and the game was to kill time before she was caught by her parents and punished. The thought of the scolding she was going to get caused her to kick the ball hard through some bushes that sectioned the park off from a steep hill leading to a creek. Anna ran after it, and when she crossed through to the other side she came face-to-face with Gabriella, who had grabbed the ball the moment it popped through to her side. They played with the ball until Anna got caught, but because the two girls hid the ball when the adults arrived, Gabriella got to keep it so they could play another round after Anna’s grounding.

“ ‘The last time they met was when they were both eighteen. Anna had cut off her pigtails when she was twelve because she didn’t like all the hair and the mean boy next door had become a friend when they were all thirteen. Gabriella had lost the ball in the creek when they were fourteen, but by then the two girls hadn’t needed an excuse to meet up. They held their final meeting before college tore them apart in the same park on the same summer day. Gabriella led Anna through the bushes, presented her with a flower, and told her she loved her. Anna said she felt the same.

“ ‘Months later Anna went to the post office to send Gabriella a hand-written note, determined to one day make sure they met again.’ …And, that is it.”

Francois nervously put the pad down and waited for Mathieu’s response. The story was terrible. Goodness, he knew it would be terrible. It was so obvious the post office had slipped his mind and he had jammed it into the end!

“That… was amazing.” Francois shot Mathieu a genuine look of surprise. “You seriously just wrote that? Wow… If I had known you weren’t exaggerating when you said you were one of the best, I would have tried a bit harder.”

“It… It was not that good…” Francois countered weakly.

“Was it print-worthy? No, but that doesn’t mean it was awful. I liked it. Gabriella and Anna were so cute!”

Francois couldn’t believe he actually started blushing. What was wrong with him?!

“W-Well, what about you,” Francois prompted. “What did you write?”

This time it was Mathieu’s turn to be shy about his writing. “Oh…um… it ain’t that great. I’m not much of a writer.”

For the first time in what felt like forever, Francois genuinely smiled. “Oh, no Monsieur Mathieu. If I had to read my story, you have to read yours. ‘If it’s really so terrible, then we’ll burn it so no one else in the whole world had to read it, okay?’ ”

Mathieu seemed to pout at having his own words used against him, but went ahead and read his story anyway.

“ ‘Once upon a time there was a polar bear and it was bored so it walked down from the arctic to where his friend the moose lived. Mr. Moose and Mr. Polar Bear decided it would be nice to go get some hot cocoa. They took a boat over to Europe so they could get the best hot chocolate in the world, which is of course in Belgium. They bought one mug for each of them and then hoped back over to Canada, where they wrapped up their little adventure by watching the Northern Lights. The end.’ ”

There were about two seconds of pause after Mathieu’s story ended before Francois broke down in laughter.

“H-Hey!” Mathieu stood up from his seat, trying to look hurt while laughter of his own threatened to burst from him. “No fair! I promised not to laugh at yours, and now you’re laughing at mine!”

“I-I apologize!” Francois gasped between laughs. “B-But that was so silly and cute! It was not what I was expecting from you at all!”

“What were you expecting? I teach kindergartners for a living, and this is the type of story they like! It’s all I’m used to reading and making up now!”

“Oh, so you are saying you were treating me like a child?” Francois could have sounded offended, but his continuous laughter made it clear he felt very playful about the whole situation.

Mathieu sat back down and put on an air of snooty confidence. “Well, those who act like children get treated like children.”

“Fair enough.”

The two men stared at each other for a few silent beats before they both collapsed into fits of laughter. In the next room Arthur and Alfred were staring at each other as well, but they did not laugh. They were almost too shocked to move.

“…Dude,” Alfred whispered. “My brother doesn’t laugh around strangers. He doesn’t  _talk_  to strangers. What I’m trying to say is if you look up the word ‘wallflower’ in the dictionary, you’ll literally find a picture of my brother, but you’ll have to squint to make him out.”

“I know, I know!” Arthur whispered back. “I have been with you for three years now, and it took a whole year for him to look me in the eyes! The person’s behavior I truly can’t get over, though, is Francois’! I have been his editor for ten years, and not once have I ever seen him rebound from one of his slumps so quickly. It is unnatural!”

Alfred gave his husband a look of horror and without saying anything Arthur understood Alfred’s fear.

“Oh, no. No, no, no. Do not worry. Your brother is safe. Francois only writes romance. He does  _not_  fall in love.”

Imagine the shock Arthur then received a week later when he was sent the following text from Francois:

_Can you give me the address of Mathieu’s workplace?_


End file.
